Thursday night's final session of the Republican National Convention may not have been exactly like LDS general conference, but there were enough "Mormon moments" to elicit a few hearty "amens" from those who are believers in both Mitt Romney and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The evening started with an invocation from Ken Hutchins, a 71-year-old retired police chief who replaced Romney as the president the LDS Church's Boston Massachusetts Stake. Hutchins is battling lymphoma, and is recovering from chemotherapy treatments that put his ability to travel to Tampa for the convention in doubt up until the last minute. But he walked steadily, if slowly, to the podium, and with a strong voice he opened the convention's final session with a prayer that was at once decidedly Christian (with its "Lord's Prayer" structure, its thankful reference to the Atonement of Jesus Christ and its closure in the name of Jesus Christ) and distinctly Mormon (with references to "the gift of the Holy Ghost, the testator of truth" and to the ability to worship "according to the dictates of our own conscience").
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